© MATT KALINOWSKIAs a kid growing up outside Asheville, North Carolina, Jacob Hooker spent a lot of time tinkering underneath cars with his mechanic father. But it was a guest speaker in his high school chemistry class who provided the spark that propelled him into research. Kent Hester, director of student and career services at North Carolina State University’s College of Textiles, told students about opportunities for studying textile chemistry. Hooker applied to NC State and won a $5,000-per-year North Carolina Textile Foundation merit scholarship, graduating in 2002. “That was one of the largest college-based scholarships on NC State’s campus at the time,” Hester recalls.
Hooker published four papers while at NC State, but when the time came to apply for grad school, he says he was “geographically driven” to branch out from his home state and explore the western half of the country. On a visit to the University of California, Berkeley, he met Matt Francis, a young biochemist who had just set up his lab the year before.
“From the very second I met him, I could just tell he was a very special individual,” says Francis, who develops techniques for the chemical modification of proteins. “He’s got a certain intensity and scientific sophistication to him that supersedes any kind of training he had.” While in Francis’s lab, Hooker published a technique for chemically modifying the interior surface ...
